A large amount of effort has been devoted to improving the efficiency of assembling orders of merchandise in warehouses, and in expeditiously labeling the ordered merchandise preparatory to shipping it to consignees, typicaly to retailers. In a proposed system, a computer stores all of the data representing orders of various consignees, and the computer is programmed to print labels for each item in each order. Warehouse personnel then pick from stock the items identified by the labels. Each label has man-readable data related to the order's consignee, such as the consignee's name and the consignee's selling price for that item. Each label also bears a bar code that uniquely identifies that specific package in the day's operations, used later in sorting the picked packages and in accounting.
That system depends on accuracy of the personnel in picking merchandise from inventory and in applying the labels. Printed labels for items not in inventory are not only wasted, but such labels must be read into the computer to reveal ordered but not-shipped merchandise. If automated picking were used in such a system, the warehouses organization would of necessity become tightly organized all the way from the storage bins to the shipping docks, becoming correspondingly inflexible in many respects and costly. Such a system is practical only for limited application.